An
artist-in-residence program at a graduate research institute? For nearly a quarter century Bard Graduate
Center has been filling in dark spots on the map of learning and at the same
time expanding the borders of that map. The new engagement with practicing
artists, in different media, represents opening another kind of research
platform, one that explores research through making, and highlights the deeply
human impulses behind the study of material culture. It follows the call issued
in 1975 by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who argued that “trying to
establish a mode of research that unites their [the arts] power with that of science and religion seems
to be a fascinating enterprise.” [Against
Method, 281].
Pearson|Shanks
arrived in early December for a week’s residency. Pearson the theater artist; Shanks the classical
archaeologist. Their tool, for years, has been Theatre/Archaeology, bringing
the the perspective of these two ways of knowing together to explore material
remains or, as they put it “a practice that re-articulates fragments of the past as real-time event.”
Percier’s ancient fantasies were both background and prompt, occasion and
object of interpretation.
Lord of the dead, earth itself,
let him ascend from forgetfulness.
Let our Persian god, born in Susa,
rise from the dark slumber, below.
Release the divine Darius…
In the earliest recorded moment of
Western drama—in Aeschylus’s The
Persians—a ghost is summoned and appears…so says Welsh theater director
and performance studies scholar Mike Pearson. Behind him the film of a somber
black car driving through a rural dwelling flickers. The sky is grey—a
typical Welsh winter. The film, an expertly shot
version of Pearson’s large-scale site-specific production of The Persians, produced by the National
Theater of Wales in an army barracks, will play throughout the
performance. Standing beside
Pearson is his colleague and creative collaborator Michael Shanks, an
archeologist and former director of The Stanford Humanities Lab. Projected on
the wall behind him is the word archaia, “Ta archaia are old things, and more—arche is originary principle, source of authority,” says Shanks. Upstairs is an
exhibition devoted to the work of Charles Percier, a 19th century French
architect who, along with his maybe lover, Pierre
François Léonard Fontaine, helped establish Napoleon’s Imperial style, forever
changing the architectural landscape of central Paris.
Over the next hour and half
Pearson and Shanks stage a dialogue that uses, image, film, personal narrative
and language to stage a kind of haunting, calling forth Marvin Carlson’s
description of theater as “a simulacrum of the cultural and historical process … as a
site for the continuing reinforcement of memory by surrogation.” For Carlson,
theater is one of the most haunted of human cultural structures. With this
Percier; too, becomes a haunted man, and his meticulous drawings and
architectural designs a kind of haunting of classical antiquity in a later,
non-classical age.
During
the performance, time frames start to collapse in on themselves and the Bard
Graduate Center Gallery, for the first time transformed into a black box
theater, starts to feel like a burial site. Pearson narrates his live
production of The Persians, the
filmed version of which plays without pause; as ancient Greek words screen on
the wall behind him, Shanks weaves descriptions of the power structures of
classical antiquity with Percier’s imaginative replaying of them. Archaia—Chora—Polis—Phalanx—Polites—Theorema—Agora—Angelos—Eunomia—Ichnos—Pragmatogony. Pearson’s account of The Persians draws out themes of the
cult of personality, the collapse of old order, the threat of regime change,
and the incipient danger of reversion to barbarism and ritual. There is a
striking resemblance to nineteenth-century France under the grasp of Napoleon,
a connection made all the more uncanny by Napoleon’s penchant for a performance
of power through a repurposed idea of classical architecture (enter Fontaine and Percier).
Over the arc of the three
performances (Monday–Wednesday–Friday, with themes developed further during
panel discussions on Tuesday and Thursday) Pearson and Shanks moved from the
encounter with the past as mediated by the Persians, through a moving and
visually arresting case study in the landscapes of the north of England, where
both of them lived as children, before arriving back in the Bard Graduate
Center’s Percier galleries on Friday night, when groups of audience members
were engaged to make close observations and descriptions of their own
encounters with antiquity. The real always lurks amidst the imagined.
